This makes very apparent a problem rooted in the Focus Tree system - it’s too rigid for quick updates. While I absolutely love them, and the player-base seems to agree, it’s too hard to keep updating and fleshing out more, especially because the devs also have many other concerns and work in such a small team.
This means that, every time they learn something new, things that work, things that don’t, design philosophies, etc, they can only use them in future designs. Otherwise, they’d probably still be working on the British Dominions to this day...
The best we can hope for are some revamps in the future, like what was done to Yugoslavia and, to a much lesser extent, Romania. I believe it is mostly tied to the system than to the devs themselves.
Is there a bigger concern than Germany, though? Germany is the most played country by far, it's more played than all the minor countries put together. A new focus tree for Germany is definiteley more pressing than a focus tree for an impoverished undeveloped country with a population of just a few million people.
Like I said, if they allow one to toggle between different focus trees in the game rules then there is nothing that prevents them from 'overwriting' old DLC focus trees with new ones. It completely avoids the situation of "DLC for DLC". It makes sense for them to not redo Yugoslavia, or Australia, Canada, etc because none of those countries are played enough to justify spending the money in labor on developing a new focus tree for them. This is very much untrue when it comes to focus trees for the most played countries like Germany and Japan.
Certainly, the Soviet Union and Italy need reworks before that happens, but after that I think they should give us new focus trees for Germany and Japan especially. If afterwards they're just going to release DLCs for these really small and impoverished countries, then that's just not going to be fun. I do enjoy playing as minors from time to time, and have enjoyed the focuses that we got from BFTB, but let's be real: Germany, Japan, Italy, Britain, France, and the US are where most of the action and fun is to be had. I just can't agree that we should be straightjacked into just accepting the current lackluster content(relatively speaking) for the major countries just because they already got focus trees while future development effort goes exclusively to really small and/or weak countries that have a really circumscribed game play experience.
As much as some people like to diss on the official focus trees and point to mod, the fact is that there aren't really any good focus tree rework mods for Japan, Germany, US, Britain, Italy, and France. Most of the high quality work in the modding scene comes for total conversion mods like Kaiserreich and TNO, not a-la-carte reworks compatible with the base game experience. In fact, once a country has received a focus tree, all modding efforts on the country in question are usually ceased permanently. There was a focus tree mod for canada, for example, and it stopped being supported as soon as Canada got a focus tree in Together for Victory. There has never been another one since then.
I agree it's a big problem with the concept of focus trees in the first place, but it's hard to see what the alternative is. The only readily apparent alternative is the one we've already seen in the old games, with everything being driven by events. This isn't a good alternative because it's actually even more rigid, and also more opaque: an event driven system only actually functions where players have foreknowledge of all potential events, their triggering conditions, and outcomes. The focus tree system allows people to see an outline of everything that can happen and commit to something, this is why alternate history works so well for them.
